The Real Fraud

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | April 20, 2024

We know Donald Trump is going to continue spouting his delusions about the results of the 2020 presidential election because those lies appear to be foundational to his 2024 campaign. It’s more distressing that his followers continue to believe that which has been proven as untrue over and over again.

Now Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, has started her tenure as co-chair of the Republican National Committee with a recorded message yammering on about the “stolen 2020 election” and replete with lies about various frauds including felons, illegal immigrants, and dead people voting; voting machines that switch votes during tabulation; and the always popular folks illegally casting multiple ballots. All of which proves, according to the Trump clan, that Donald Trump easily won the 2020 presidential election that was stolen from him. Here’s a bulletin—no he didn’t and no it wasn’t. If they keep lying, others must keep telling the truth.

In fact, the 2020 presidential election in the most contested states was scrutinized, recounted, audited, and reviewed by multiple sources multiple times.

Votes in the two most populous counties in Wisconsin were recounted; Antrim County was audited and recounted by hand here in Michigan; at least one Pennsylvania county was recounted by hand; and there were two statewide recounts in Georgia. These efforts involved both Republican and Democratic election officials in states controlled by both Republican and Democratic legislatures and led by both Republican and Democratic governors. No evidence of widespread fraud was found. Then-President Trump’s own Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said the 2020 election was the most secure in our history.

Then there was Arizona and all the claims, including some of the most bizarre, about voting shenanigans in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than half the state’s voters. If any type of voter fraud has ever existed, then surely somebody claimed it took place in Maricopa County.

In 2020, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors was majority Republican, the county clerk was a Republican, and the governor and attorney general were Republicans. Those able to exercise any sort of control over the election’s procedures were Republicans, and most had publicly supported Donald Trump.

County voters cast more than 2 million ballots, 91 percent of them cast early by mail or dropped off before election day—a turnout of about 80 percent. Though traditionally a Republican voter stronghold, the county had been drifting lately, and in 2020 Joe Biden was 45,000 votes better than Donald Trump. Claims of fraud immediately sprang from the losers’ imaginations.

The ballots were then recounted by machine, a large sample was recounted by hand, an audit was done of the tabulating machines, an audit conducted of 18,000 randomly selected ballots for votes and signature verification, and when all of that had been done, a group sponsored by Trump supporters undertook a months-long alleged hand recount of all 2 million plus ballots.

Maricopa County’s 2020 general election ballots were recounted, audited, recounted, audited, and recounted again. In the end, no widespread fraud was found, and even the Trump-sponsored group’s efforts found nothing suspicious…but did discover an additional 99 votes for Biden.

(Arizonans, by the way, have been happily doing on-request, no-excuse mail-in voting for more than 30 years.)

The Heritage Foundation keeps a database of voter fraud, including efforts by non-citizens to vote. From 2002 through 2022, of more than a billion ballots legally cast, they documented fewer than 100 examples of non-citizens attempting to vote. Their current roster of examples of fraud is limited to a relative handful of individuals, knowingly or otherwise, attempting to vote when they cannot legally do so. The Brennan Center for Justice found 30 such examples of individual voter fraud in the 2016 election cycle.

Nowhere have examples of widespread voter fraud significant enough to alter major elections been shown to exist. But somehow that myth, now really just a destructive lie, has turned into anger toward election officials deemed responsible for problems that did not and do not exist. The Bipartisan Policy Center surveyed 18,000 election officials from all 50 states and found harassment and threats a leading cause of a 39 percent turnover rate. Even worse, 70 percent of election officials in cities of more than 100,000 faced harassment or received threats.

Since it’s mostly our friends and neighbors who oversee our elections—and take that responsibility seriously—suggesting widespread election fraud is to accuse those neighbors of being liars, cheats, and co-conspirators in felonies depriving you of your voting franchise. Believing such a conspiracy, that would have had to involve thousands of Republicans and Democrats in multiple states across the country, is utter nonsense. Believing it of local election officials is just rude.

The ongoing false assertions of election fraud are the real fraud.